Work suffered on the 215 km-long Lumding - Silchar section of the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) because of the militancy in the area and the project crawled along. Dr Manmohan Singh, who represents Assam in the Rajya Sabha, upgraded it to a national project and increased its funding. But the Railways say bulk of the work was completed only in the last two years: perhaps the reason why Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted rail connectivity in the North East as one of the achievements of his government.